[CFP] EPISTEMIC TRANSLATION: TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGES
Nova University of Lisbon, 14-16 December 2023
In the conclusion to his 2017 work Translationality, the translation scholar Douglas Robinson (2017:200-203) proposed to extend Jakobson’s (1959) famous tripartite division of translation with the introduction of a new category that he calls inter-epistemic translation. Defined as translation between different knowledge systems, it would focus on the transfer or transmission of knowledge between different ‘written genres (or semiotic worlds)’ in a process of narrative reframing ‘which is never a “cloning” of knowledge, of course, but always involves… “translationality”: adaptation, transformation’ (2017: 200). In the pages that followed, Robinson envisaged a whole series of different relations that could be studied under this rubric, ranging from the kinds of operations contemplated in translational medicine and the medical humanities, through the writing of popular science and representation of scientific issues in literary fiction to the study of how knowledges transform over time as epistemological paradigms wax and wane.
At the same time as Robinson was completing Translationality, the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos was refining his concept of ‘intercultural translation’ to describe a slightly different but related manoeuvre, namely the translation that could and does occur between ‘the knowledges or cultures of the global North (Eurocentric, Western-centric) and [those of] the global South, the east included’ (2018: 34). Developed most fully in his 2016 work Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (2016: 212-236), ‘intercultural translation’ is assumed as part of an ethical mission to undo the ‘epistemicide’ resulting from the hegemony of western science, by working towards the ‘ecologies of knowledge’ necessary to achieve ‘cognitive justice’ (2016: 188-211).
At the core of ecology of knowledges is the idea that different types of knowledge are incomplete in different ways and that raising the consciousness of such reciprocal incompleteness /…/ will be a precondition for achieving cognitive justice. Intercultural translation is the alternative both to the abstract universalism that grounds Western-centric general theories and to the idea of incommensurability between cultures” (Santos 2016: 213).
This interdisciplinary conference, organized within the ambit of the EPISTRAN project, draws on both of these proposals to investigate the semiotic processes (verbal and nonverbal) involved in the transfer of information between different ‘epistemic systems’. Its main focus are the transactions occurring between western science (the hegemonic knowledge of the globalized world, which purports to be objective, rational and universal) and the various embedded, embodied and subjective forms of knowledge that have served as its Others in different times and places.
Hence, proposals are invited about the translational processes involved in:
educational science, the popularization of science, the creation of literary works on scientific themes
translational medicine and science, the medical humanities
analogue-to-digital conversion and vice versa (this includes not only computer languages but also systems such as morse code, and the various attempts to create a universal language of knowledge by reproducing in verbal language the rigour of mathematics)
bringing western science (particularly medical and technical knowledge) to indigenous peoples of the Global South
bringing the epistemologies of indigenous peoples of the Global South to the attention of the west/north
bringing Oriental epistemologies (e.g. Buddhism, Dao, Yoga) to the west
the reconceptualization of pre-scientific knowledges (such as alchemy, astrology, Aristotelian physics, logic, rhetoric) in the early modern period
intersemiotic reconstruals taking place in different historical periods in the domains of cosmology, cosmography and cartography
Though members of the EPISTAN project are expected to present a paper, the conference is open to anyone that is currently researching these subjects or related ones. We hope to attract scholars and early career researchers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including (but not limited to): translation studies, literary studies, linguistics, anthropology, history, philosophy, information technology, translational science and medicine. After the conference, selected papers will be published in a special issue of the online journal Translation Matters (Autumn 2024), as well as a volume to be submitted to a prestigious international publisher.
For more details, please visit: https://www.epistran.org/initiatives-outputs#h.pb9orknll0sf